Oddworld: New ’n’ Tasty: games review

New ’n’ Tasty is a remake of Abe’s Oddysee, a captivating puzzler of a platform game, originally released in 1997.

It tells the story of meat-factory worker Abe, who discovers that the plant’s latest processed treat is made out of his fellow workers. Your job is to help rescue as many as possible on the way to smashing the system. It’s benefitted from a few tweaks but New ’n’ Tasty is essentially the same game rebuilt with today’s technology, which means a few new bits of fancy camera work, and also that the parts you control now look at least as good as the pre-rendered cut scenes did 17 years ago.

The difficulty level has also been attenuated to make it slightly less brutal for a generation unaccustomed to multiple re-tries, although there are still plenty of sections that will see you getting Abe blown up, sawn to pieces, vaporised, crushed and machine-gunned by the game’s enraged, tentacle-faced Sligs. It’s tricky, enthralling and darkly witty.

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK

Godus

From Peter Molyneux, the man who made Populous, an 80s PC game where your godlike powers let you flatten mountains and fill in lakes to help flocks of tiny followers build bigger settlements, comes Godus, a new game about exactly the same thing. Arriving in virgin territory, your work as benevolent super-being is to create as much level space as possible for your people so that they can build houses, create farms and dig mines. The slightly wayward AI of your little followers and the fact that your entire purpose is to turn each location into a flat, empty plateau undermines some of the joy of discovery, as do the long waiting times for things to be built. Its meditative pace and deliberate blocking of long play sessions make this one to dip into, but even in small doses it can still feel directionless.